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The View from My Kitchen

Benvenuti! I hope you enjoy il panorama dalla mia cucina Italiana -- "the view from my Italian kitchen,"-- where I indulge my passion for Italian food and cooking. From here, I share some thoughts and ideas on food, as well as recipes and restaurant reviews, notes on travel, and a few garnishes from a lifetime in the entertainment industry.

You can help by leaving comments on posts and by becoming a follower. More than a hundred thousand people all over the world have viewed the blog and that's great. But every great leader needs followers and if I am ever to achieve my goal of becoming the next great leader of the Italian culinary world :-) I need followers! I promise, I'm not going to spam anybody. I'd just like to know who's out there and what your thoughts are on what I'm doing.

Wednesday, December 14, 2011

You've heard it said; “Never trust a
skinny chef.” And “Fat Chef” décor is all the rage. I even
have a few decorative pieces with rotund Italian chefs adorning my
kitchen and dining room.

But in real life, are fat chefs
necessarily a good thing? Lean and mean chef Gordon Ramsay – who
once tipped the scales at 250 pounds – doesn't think so. “I don't
think chefs should be fat,” he opines. “It's just not a good
advert,” he says, reasoning that a fat chef reflects a sloppy
kitchen.

And now comes word that the Food
Network is planning to take on the issue of fat chefs in an eponymous
new series. Fat Chef, premiering January 26 (2012), will
feature chefs whose obvious love of food has led them to the health
problems many overweight and obese people face. Except most
overweight people aren't forced into a face-to-face, day-to-day
relationship with their nemesis the way food professionals are.

Fat Chef will
follow participants through a four-month course of therapy and weight
loss programs to help them overcome their weight issues and their
abusive relationships with food. Kind of a kitchen version of Biggest
Loser.

It
looks like another step in the culinary cable giant's “reality”
evolution. The move away from increasingly contrived and derivative
“competition” shows is a good thing. Seems like every time my
wife and I watch Food Network programming lately, we find ourselves
saying something like, “Hey, didn't we just see that on Top
Chef last week?” Imitation may
be the sincerest form of flattery, but there are limits. Although
it's technically a “competition” show, the network's Chef
Hunter is a nice change of pace
and the recent episode of Chopped that
featured real, honest-to-goodness school cafeteria cooks instead of
the usual coterie of the trash-talking, over-inflated walking egos
that clutter up the place on a regular basis was compelling
television. Like many other critics, I think the Scripps purse
strings could have been a little looser for the occasion, but it was
a good idea and one that I hope will become a regular feature.
Tattooed, spiky-haired bad boys (and girls) bragging about their
awesomeness and then whining when they get “chopped” is getting a
little old.

I'll
be more likely to tune in Fat Chef than
I will Food Network's other New Year offering, Rachael vs
Guy Celebrity Cook-Off, in which
the overly ubiquitous Guy Fieri and Rachael Ray coach teams of
celebrities seeking to win a $50,000 prize for charity. That opus
begins a six-episode run on January 1.

And it
is hoped that The Big Waste won't
be as Bobby Flay and Michael Symon take on Alex Guarnaschelli and
Anne Burrell in a challenge to cook a three-course meal for a hundred
people in a forty-eight hour time frame using only ingredients that
would have otherwise been consigned to the trash. That special event
airs on January 8.

Who Am I (and Why Should You Care)?

I've been around long enough to know a little bit about a lot of things. That said, there are a couple of things I know a little bit more about; food and entertainment.

I've been cooking since I was a kid -- a very long time, indeed -- and I've spent most of my adult life in the entertainment industry.

I've been writing about one or the other of these topics since the '80s, and I have been published in numerous magazines and newspapers over the years. I also spent the better part of two decades behind a microphone as the host of my own radio talk show.

Does all of this make me an expert? Nah! But I'm certainly entitled to my opinion -- and so are you! :-)